Arrival and Day 1

My trip here was long. After flying from LA to NY, I took about a 12 hour hiatus before flying from New York to Brussels, and then finally, after what was supposed to be a 12 hour layover, flying Brussels to Tel Aviv.

Over the next five months, I am living in shared apartments in Israel. I will be learning Hebrew, taking classes in Israeli politics, history and culture, and interning, at what looks to be at this point, at MEMRI (Middle Eastern Media Research Institute). I'll be using these classes and this internship to jump start my documentary work. My blog will be my experiences, my thoughts, and most importantly, a forum for much of my raw footage - where I hope people will comment on their thoughts - and how they think it can be used in the final product(s).

My first sense of how "different" Israel would be hit me at the airport...not even in Tel Aviv, but in Brussels. In the screening process for check-in for most flights to Israel, they conduct a pre-interview, to gather some information not just about why you are entering the country, but your background, your interests, etc. They aim to find out as much about your past so they can track what one's reasons for entering Israel might be, and what you will be doing while in the country. During this, I was tired, without sleep, and as I typically do when I speak to people, I was rolling my eyes, and looking all around. At every moment that my eyes strayed even the slightest, her head sharply turned, trying at every moment to catch everywhere my eyes went. Her looks were almost frightening, as she vehemently stayed with me, almost uncomfortably.

I had always maintained that when people asked me, "Isn't it scary there?" that I felt safer here than I ever felt in L.A., New York or Boston. That there are policeman everywhere, that I have never felt crime around the corner, or that something was about to happen to me. But that comes at a price, a constant infiltration of your privacy - and I guess I must be thankful for that. It made me wonder, for the first time, however, as a young Jewish white girl, with a place set up for her, going to Israel for all the right reasons, with all the paperwork intact and in hand, what it must be like for someone else. What it must be like for a young Palestinian girl, returning to her home in Israel, going home for all the right reasons in her mind, having to go through an obscene screening process, to perhaps only be interrogated. I am not one, not will I ever be, so I cannot say. In the end though, I feel safe, so I must be thankful?

I had two senses of being in Israel on day 1. The first, as I mentioned above, was political. The second, religious. In Boston, (even amongst some Orthodox communities) I feel must more religious. I feel by simply wearing a skirt on a Saturday, waking up early, I am a Jew. Whether or not this is true, I feel Jewish, and I feel that people can see it on me. I am different. Here - in the city of Jerusalem, where many ultra-orthodox communities are only minutes away by foot, at times I feel naked, under-dressed. I am no longer, "the religious one." Supermarkets and malls that are filled with males in Yarmulkes and women in long skirts and covered hair. While I am sure that the women and men of Jerusalem see their fair share of what they would call the unobservant, I still felt slightly watched. Maybe it is the knowledge that I am an American in a foreign country, and maybe the do not care in the least. But even in the first 24 hours, I feel it. And I wonder how this will continue to manifest itself over the coming months.

In sharing the two ways Israel hit me in the face, I have shared what my two goals of growth are to be over the coming months. Political and Religious. I came here to continue my personal study of Middle Eastern politics, in an effort to experiment in the field of political documentaries, and see how I can become more well-rounded in international media and politics. On the other end, I cannot deny my continued curiosity for both Israel and Judaism. Sometimes I am not sure where one ends, and the latter begins, but I am sure these coming months will tell. On the religious front, I am reluctant to write much, as I assume, for some reason, that you are least interested in that part of me as well.

So day 1 seems successful. Except for the part that the reason I am writing this is because it is 6am, and I did not go to sleep last night....for now we shall ignore the physical needs ...